Integrating pedological and geophysical methods to enhance the informative value of an archaeological prospection – The example of a Roman villa rustica near Regensburg,Germany

Geophysical prospection techniques are widely used to visualize the buried past. Various methods such as magnetometry, electric resistance mapping and electric resistivity tomography and ground penetrating radar yield different results. The use of all three techniques in combination with aerial photography interpretation and pedological mapping is highly effective, but it requires a multi-layer approach. This paper presents such a multi-layer approach carried out at a site with buried remnants of a Roman villa rustica in southern Germany. The integration of the various results into a geographical information system leads to a geocodation of all outcomes and a final archaeological interpretation. Several buildings in different states of preservation, different kinds of ground floors both with and without hypocausts, perimeter walls and kilns could all be detected. The soil mapping results helped in the geophysical interpretation by outsourcing soil erosion and accumulation areas. It is shown that none of the employed methods could have supplied all the compiled information on their own, and the strengths and weaknesses of each method is discussed in order to point out the implications for archaeologists.     

Nationalism and war commemoration – a Latin American exceptionalism?

Recent scholarship on collective memory and nationalism in Latin America argues that – in sharp contrast to Europe – war commemoration has been of little importance to the memory work of states in the region. The article challenges this claim. A comparative‐historical analysis of school textbooks and school ceremonies in twentieth‐century Mexico, Argentina and Peru reveals that the commemoration of major civil and international wars was central to official national narratives in these countries. The article further identifies important qualitative changes in war commemoration over time, especially with respect to how commemorative discourses portrayed agency and assigned responsibility for military victories and losses. These changes are situated within broader transformations of nationalism and new alignments in the politics of nationhood and memory.     

The globally connected Western Ukrainian village

Abstract

What analytical framework do we need in order to study villages shaped by intensive and long-lasting migration processes? The author tackles this question by scrutinizing the history of a Western Ukrainian village from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century in a case study. Migrants and non-migrants alike were closely interconnected to each other by manifold networks. This kind of interconnectedness proved to be amazingly persistent and did not lose its function even decades after the migration processes themselves had come to an end due to economic or political caesurae. In order to fully grasp this phenomenon, it is necessary to synthesize migration and village history, striving towards a ‘micro history of the globally connected village’.     

Why Worldwide Bible Translation Grows Exponentially

The number of languages into which the Bible has been translated has grown exponentially during the past 2,300 years. The history of Bible translation can be divided into three periods of growth, each with its distinct limiting and driving forces. In the low‐growth period between 260 BCE and 1814 CE growth was constrained by the rise of Islam and later by the information monopoly of the Catholic Church. The year 1815 was the inflection point, at which annual growth rates rose from below 1 to above 1 per cent. The century 1815–1914 was a period of substantial growth due to the co‐occurrence of three driving forces: Christian revivalism, internationalisation, and industrialisation. This was followed by a third period—the era of explosive growth between 1915 and today—in which information technology and the organisational structure of translation agencies have spurred growth. An array of multinational organisations of Anglo‐Saxon origin have created a quasi‐monopoly for worldwide Bible translation. The exponential growth of worldwide Bible translation can be modelled by a mathematical function. Using this function and assuming the continuation of current trends, it is possible to project the end of the history of pioneer Bible translation sometime between 2026 and 2031.     

WAGES,RENTS, UNEMPLOYMENT,AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE: A CONSISTENT THEORY‐BASED MEASURE

Combining a spatial equilibrium model with a search‐matching unemployment model, this paper analyzes the willingness to pay for regional amenities and the regional quality of life when wages, rents, and unemployment risk compensate for local amenities and disamenities. The results are compared with those obtained from the Rosen‐Roback approach. We demonstrate that the traditional approach gives too much weight to the wage differential if search frictions are significant. Furthermore, the paper confirms that the wage curve is negatively sloped for quasi‐linear utility. Specifically, the wage rate increases and the unemployment rate decreases in response to an increase in the amenity level if the amenity is marginally more beneficial to producers than to consumers.     

Measuring the Effects of Consensus-building Processes with Methods of Intervention Research

In recent years, both environmental policy and research have emphasized the importance of involving the public in decision-making. This push for more participation is driven by considerable optimism about its ability to improve the quality of decisions and developments. There is, however, a lack of empirical research to support this assumption. The few studies that have attempted to measure the effect of public participation are of limited validity, as they were based on ex-post data mainly gained from expert assessments or document analysis. This paper reports on a recent study to measure and compare the effect of two consensus-building processes in a systematic and reliable way. This involved developing a new evaluation method based on the methodology of intervention research in environmental psychology. It was tested and applied in this study with two similarly designed consensus-building processes conducted in two neighbouring valleys of the Eastern Swiss Alps. These evaluation experiments showed that (a) the new evaluation method can measure and compare the effects of consensus-building processes in a differentiated and reliable way; and (b) consensus-building processes have systematic and partly statistically significant effects (at least in the short term) on several aspects of regional consensus. The initial results suggest that this new evaluation method is a promising way of obtaining reliable evidence about the societal effects of participatory processes.